The Conveniences Offered By Telecom Billing Solutions

by erin on November 30, 2010

Telecommunications today encompasses a wide range of services like landline phones, cellular phones and even video and internet data services. Among each of these categories there are many sub categories based on the kind of service and quality of service, etc. With all these varied offerings, keeping track of the billing can be a real challenge for the service provider. This is where a robust telecom billing solution becomes critical.

When one looks at advanced nations, the service providers have moved from plain telephone service providers to bundled service providers. Their customers can now opt for high speed internet, with long distance land line phones and a digital television service. While they are three different services, the customers expect to get a single unified bill. Consolidating all these services into one bill can be quite a challenge for the service providers.

Mobile services are another domain where billing is important. The modern mobile services come with voice messaging and data plans. The voice service could have variations of 100 minutes free to completely unlimited services. Similarly, the data plans have a data traffic cap. If this cap is exceeded, additional usage needs to be billed separately. This adds another dimension to telecom billing.

Lastly, in the developing nations with fast growing mobile markets, the operators come out with offers for very short time durations like over the weekend. In such cases, the billing solution needs to be able to adapt to the ever changing rates and the fickle needs of the customers. This again requires a robust billing system.

The way standard billing solutions work is that the sales representatives sign up a customer and enter the service details into the system along with the billing date. The billing system coordinates with the network to monitor the traffic usage of the customer and collects the information necessary for billing. With the appropriate details, the system will generate the bills accordingly.

While creation of the bill is one aspect, distribution and collection of money are the other factors in the billing solution. The distribution network needs to be excellent to ensure that every customer receives the bill well in advance. This could be done online or by mailing out the hardcopies of the bills.

The collection of payments is vital for the company as that brings in the money to sustain the operations. There are many avenues through which the customers could pay the bills as per their convenience. Some people may prefer to use checks, others pay online, and a few others may pay by cash at the collection centers. The billing solution needs to consolidate all these avenues and maintain the right record.

In conclusion, telecom OSS is a very complex but highly critical part of telecom operations. The solution needs to be easy to use and yet smart enough to accept the variety of service combinations that customers across the global demand. Due to the regional variations on the telecom service usage behavior, the billing solution needs to be highly versatile as well as very flexible.

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